Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T04:54:56.707Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - The Royal Library under Henry VIII

from COLLECTIONS AND OWNERSHIP

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Get access

Summary

At one time or another, Henry VIII owned more than fifty palaces, each presumably with its own collection of books. Books seem to have been moved from one library to another and it is not possible to divide the various collections rigidly by function. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, however, as earlier, the main collection was housed at Richmond, which had been rebuilt after Sheen was destroyed by fire in 1497. During the reign of Henry VII, Quentin Poulet had been granted an annual salary of 10 marks for keeping the King’s Library, though Poulet would have been employed principally as scribe and illuminator (see figs. 12.2 and 12.3). In the first year of Henry VIII’s reign, Giles Duwes was described as Keeper of the King’s Library at Richmond, with an annuity of £10, and, in 1534, William Tyldesley was designated Keeper of the King’s library ‘in the manor of Richmond and elsewhere’, also at £10 per year. In February 1535, a French visitor, possibly Palamède Gontier, Treasurer of Brittany, drew up a list of 143 titles in the library at Richmond, almost all of which were in French, and many of which were large and elegant manuscripts of Burgundian-Netherlandish taste, prepared for Edward IV. This list, which seems to cover the whole contents of the library, suggests that the Richmond collection was a personal one built up by successive monarchs, rather than an institutional repository.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Backhouse, J. M. 1987Founders of the Royal Library: Edward IV and Henry VII as collectors of illuminated manuscripts’, in Williams, D. (ed.), England in the fifteenth century: proceedings of the Harlaxton Symposium for 1986, Woodbridge.Google Scholar
Birrell, T. A. 1987a English monarchs and their books from Henry VII to Charles II, Panizzi Lectures 1986, London.
Brewer, J. S. et al. (eds.), Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, 22 vols. in 38, London 1864–1932.
Carley, J. P. 1997bMarks in books and the libraries of Henry VIII’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 91.Google Scholar
Coates, A. 1991The old library at Trinity College, Oxford’, Bodleian Library Record, 13.Google Scholar
Dowling, M. 1991Anne Boleyn as patron’, in Starkey, 1991.
Gameson, R. and Coates, A. 1988 The Old Library, Trinity College, Oxford, Oxford.
Hobson, G. D. 1929 Bindings in Cambridge libraries, Cambridge.
Leland, J. 1549 The laboryouse journey & serche of Johan Leyland, for Englandes antiquitees …, London (rpt Amsterdam 1975).
Liddell, J. R. 1935Some notes on the library of Reading Abbey’, Bodleian Quarterly Review, 8.Google Scholar
Nixon, H. M. 1978 Five centuries of English bookbinding, London.
Omont, H. 1891Les manuscrits français des rois d’Angleterre au château de Richmond’, in Etudes romanes dédiées à Gaston Paris, Paris.Google Scholar
Starkey, D. (ed.) 1998 The inventory of Henry VIII, Vol. i: The transcript, London.
Toulmin Smith, L. (ed.), 1906–10 The itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, 5 vols., London.
Von Bülow, G. (ed.) 1892, assisted by Powell, W., ‘Diary of the journey of Philip Julius, duke of Stettin-Pomerania, through England in the year 1602’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, n.s., 6.Google Scholar
Winn, M. B. 1997 Anthoine Vérard, Parisian publisher, 1485–1512: prologues, poems and presentations, Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance 313, Geneva.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×