This map shows a sizeable Wealden estate consisting of a substantial yeoman’s house with two barns, agricultural buildings, an extensive orchard in three sections and 180 acres of land and woods, their names and acreages indicated in each parcel. The landscape is liberally dotted with ponds and pits, the result of the extraction of marl and iron ore. Typically of Wealden surveys of this period, the estate is mapped with south at the top and north at the bottom, confirming that in Sussex, men’s mental picture of their environment was focussed on the coastal plain and the sea and not on London, as would gradually become the case as communications improved. The accuracy of the survey is such that, despite extensive boundary-changes, each of the fields can still be readily plotted on a modern map.
Search FNL grants since 1931
Lambton was widely acknowledged in his lifetime as one of the foremost political figures of his generation. He was very well connected, regionally, nationally and internationally, through familial, personal and professional relationships; and his role in the campaign for reform placed him at the centre of English politics. Lambton is best known as one of the key figures responsible for the Great Reform Act of 1832.The most important section of the archive relates to this central concern of his life. The papers, including many hundreds of letters, drafts of speeches and other documents, provide a detailed insight into the politics of the period and the progress of the Bill.
A collection of paper and photographic records relating to the naval and maritime history of Portland which was at one time one of the country’s most important naval bases; a base for the Channel and Home fleets. The collection contains a series of photographs, some of them in the form of original glass plate negatives showing the very busy naval harbour and its range of installations, the ships that anchored there and men who crewed them. In addition, and perhaps most interestingly, are the original specifications and pricing for the Portland (outer) breakwater extension, dated 1897. These mammoth structures, now Grade II Listed, which took nine years to complete, were required in part to protect the base against torpedo attack, which by that time was clearly regarded as a serious threat to the integrity of the fleet.
An important series of letters which add detail and colour to the life and times of a significant British writer, in whom there is a resurgence of interest by academic and other researchers. Townsend Warner spent the greater part of her life in rural Dorset with her same-sex partner Valentine Ackland. They were committed communists who supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War (describing in one letter the ‘strange, fairy-tale hospitality’ they received at a Writers’ Congress) and are studied for their political beliefs, literary output and what was, by contemporary standards, unorthodox relationship. Warner wrote a series of novels including Lolly Willowes, Mr Fortune’s Maggot and The Corner That Held Them as well biography and poetry, some of which was co-authored with Ackland..
The letter is part of a sequence of correspondence with Hayley, written from Cowper’s house at Weston Underwood near Olney. Cowper was then sixty. In March 1792 Hayley wrote to introduce himself. Both men had been commissioned by rival publishers to work on John Milton. Thanks to the success of The Task, published in 1785, Cowper’s poetry was well known, and so too his melancholy and his rural lifestyle. Cowper had already had several breakdowns, and was nursed back to health by his companion Mary Unwin.
In the latter part of the year 2019 the Cornwall Archives and Cornish Studies Service (Kresen Kernow) was offered, by private treaty, a number of archival items relating to the Cornish estate of the Earl of Kimberley in the Falmouth area.
The Chippendale Society is extremely grateful for the support of the Friends of the National Libraries, which has enabled it to add a group of previously unknown drawings to its collection. They were discovered in a collection of architectural drawings bearing the bookplate of Alexander Manning (1819-1903). Manning was an Irishman who arrived in Toronto in 1834. A carpenter by training, he became one of the most successful builders and property developers in the city.
A full purchase grant from FNL has secured for us a really fine copy of the 1929 first edition of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, with line engravings by David Jones. It was published by Douglas Cleverdon, who later became famous as a pioneering radio producer, responsible, most notably, for the production of Dylan Thomas’s radio play Under Milk Wood. This is a particularly appropriate acquisition, as Jones was for a long time a friend of Campion Hall, a small Jesuit College in Oxford, sending cards and small works of art, and advising on the decoration of the painted chapel. His artist’s proofs for the Ancient Mariner engravings came to us after his death, but we have never had a copy of the book until now.
A newly discovered book from the library of the Cambridge scholar and bibliophile Gabriel Harvey (1552/3–1631), extensively and engagingly annotated throughout, has recently been acquired by Cambridge University Library through the generosity of the Friends of the National Libraries. This polemical pamphlet on Catherine de Medici attracted enormous attention immediately upon its publication, its anonymous author clearly a witness in Paris to the political and religious upheavals that agitated the capital during the first half the 1570s. Modelled satirically on a saint’s life, the Discourse purports to expose the devious and perverse character of Catherine, which threatens to lead to the destruction of the French kingdom. At once an anti-Italian and misogynist assault on the Queen Mother, it represents one of the foundational texts behind the notorious image of Catherine as the Black Queen.
This exceptionally rare book of Orthodox liturgy and theology in Old Church Slavonic is an exciting addition to the collection of early Slavonic books found across collegiate Cambridge. It contains 31 chapters covering all aspects of the Orthodox tradition, including polemical treatises against heretics, Catholics, and traitors to the Orthodox faith. Much of the content is derived from the earlier writings of Zakhariia Kopystens’kyi, Archimandrite of the Kyiv-Pechersk Monastery, which discuss the state of religion and belief in Orthodox Eastern Europe, the differences between the Eastern and Western churches, the significance of icons, apostolic power, churches, the role of the Patriarch, and more. The publication was sanctioned by the Orthodox Church and printed by Stefan Boniface (Stefan Vonifat’ev), a prominent protopope.