Articles published about the Cwm Jesuit Library

As the end of the project approaches and the thesis submission date nears (a bit too quickly for my liking!), I am delighted to say that I have had two articles published about the Cwm Jesuit Library in the last few weeks.

The first article, entitled 'The Society of Jesus in Wales, c.1600–1679: Rediscovering the Cwm Jesuit Library at Hereford Cathedral' was published in the newly established Journal of Jesuit Studies, volume 1, issue 4 - a special issue of the journal that focused on the English Jesuit mission in its various connotations. My article (pp. 572–588) is a summary of the key points of my research and discoveries over the last three years, and includes a historical overview and analysis of key provenance inscriptions, as well as some illustrations. The article is effectively a mini-version of my thesis, and is available to read online here.

The second article, has been published in the latest issue of Recusant History, the journal of the Catholic Record Society. This article, entitled ‘Missioners on the Margins? The territorial headquarters of the Welsh Jesuit College of St Francis Xavier at the Cwm, c. 1600–1679’ is a more detailed account of the history of Jesuit association with the Cwm farms at Llanrothal, near Hereford. 

The article argues for a re-evaluation of the Welsh District and its importance to the successes of the English Jesuit Province, concluding that, far from being a small, local missionary outpost of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, the College of St Francis Xavier, or the Welsh District, was in fact a diverse, vibrant and crucially important lynchpin in the successes of the Jesuits in England and Wales. Although not yet available online, the article appears in Recusant History vol 32 issue 2 (pp. 173–193), a bi-annual journal that is sent to all members - enquiries can be sent to the membership secretary James Hagerty membership@catholicrecordsociety.co.uk. The journal name is changing to British Catholic History from January 2015.

The issue of Recusant History also included my summary of conference proceedings from the Society's 57th annual conference, which was held at Downing College, Cambridge in July (pp. 267–270). A copy of the review was also posted to this blog in a previous post.

 

 

Between the covers: Evidence of owners

In this post I am going to focus on one set of inscriptions that appears with some frequency within the Cwm collection - the signature of Edward Poyntz (c.1570-1615). Those of you who have heard me present papers at various conferences over the last few months will have been made aware of the significance of these inscriptions.

Poyntz's signature appears on 25 of the books, all printed between 1564 and 1605. The inscriptions usually feature an abbreviated form of his name, a price, a date that is often 1605 and his motto 'Potiora Spero' (I hope for better), as in the illustration below (click here for more information):

C.3.1 - In Canticum Canticorum (Paris: 1603) 

Edward Poyntz was a member of the well known Catholic family of Iron Acton in Gloucestershire, as well as Tockington and Caerleon in Monmouthshire. He was the son of Sir Nicholas Poyntz (1537-1585) and his second wife, Lady Margaret Stanley (d. 1586), and as such has all but been ignored from official family records. 

Poyntz seems to have been an active member of the Catholic community, described in a 1605 report by the High Sheriff of Herefordshire as being "altogether Jesuited". The same report connects William Morgan of Llantarnam with "Jones the Jesuit, the firebrand of all", illustrating the strong links between members of the clandestine catholic community that analysis of the Cwm library begins to unlock. 

The Poyntz family were notoriously Catholic - it was said by superstitious locals that when Edward's father Sir Nicholas Poyntz died in 1585, thousands of ravens rested on his house and the nearby church where he was buried for a whole month afterwards.

Eventually my research led me to Edward Poyntz's will, made in October 1613 and proved shortly after he died in September 1615, which contained a rather significant bequest that "he bequeath all his bookes to Nicholas and John Poyntz his sonnes to be equallie parted between them." (TNA PROB 11/126)

A bit more research revealed that his youngest son John Poyntz (1602-1671) entered the Society of Jesus a few years later, professing his four vows in 1640 having been ordained in 1633. John is more commonly known by his alias John Stephens and by his other two aliases of Campion or Scripsam, which is why the connection had not been made before with the more famous Poyntz family of Iron Acton. Jesuit records state that John Stephens (vere Poyntz) served at the College of St Francis Xavier between 1640 and 1646, which is presumably how Edward Poyntz's books ended up as part of the Cwm library. 

This case casts an interesting light onto how the Cwm library may have been formed, highlighting the  possibility that it is in fact composed of several personal collections, somewhat haphazardly added in to the core Jesuit collection. 

Where is the Cwm?

The Cwm has often been casually referred to in this project blog, and I realised (to my horror) that I had never geographically located the premises, nor indeed the other two farms of the Upper Cwm and Llangunville that made up the headquarters of the Jesuit College of St Francis Xavier, or the Welsh District of the English Province. 

Upon the creation of the English Province of the Society of Jesus in 1622, it was decided that the best way to manage this newly created province would be to divide England and Wales into districts, each described as you can see here as residences or colleges:

From Maurice Whitehead 'To provide for the edifice of learning': researching 450 years of Jesuit education and cultural history with particular reference to the British Jesuits, History of Education, 36 (2007), p.123.

The terms 'college' or 'residence' denote financial position and ability to secure funds - a 'college' indicates a secure annual income, whereas a 'residence' relied on donations and was therefore less secure. Each district roughly equates to a geographical county, as you can see on the map, and it was felt this would enable efficient administration whilst still allowing operations to remain relatively undetected. 

The Cwm farms were headquarters of the largest district - the Welsh mission, which initially encompassed area 4 and area 11 - all of Wales, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Somerset. By 1670, the area had been reduced to a more manageable size (area 4), the Residence of St Winefride had been created in North Wales (area 11), and the College of St Francis Xavier was now the South Wales, Hereford, Gloucester and Somerset district. 

The Cwm itself is indicated by the little black dot just above the River Severn: a tripartite settlement of the Cwm, the Upper Cwm and Llangunville farms in the Monnow Valley on the borders of Wales and England, as well as near the three county borders of Herefordshire, Monmouthshire and Gloucestershire. The area had developed rapidly as a Catholic stronghold in the post-reformation period. 

A closer look at the area shows the proximity of the farms to the better known locations of Monmouth and Hereford, as well as to Raglan:

Map courtesy of Professor Maurice Whitehead, Swansea University

A zoomed in map gives a better idea of the locations of the three farms in relation to each other, as well as the surrounding terrain, and it is worth noting that you cannot see either of the other properties from any one farm:

Grid Reference: SO 4890 1763

Although none of the original farmhouses survive today, it is still possible to get an idea of the way it would have looked when occupied by the Jesuits. Many of the barns and other farm buildings on all three sites are the original 17th century buildings, and the cellars of both The Cwm and the Upper Cwm are also from the same period. The area is still difficult to access, even with modern vehicles, and it is very easy to understand the Jesuits choice of location in this beautiful and secluded valley. 

'The World is Our House': a symposium of Jesuit culture at Hereford Cathedral

An exciting symposium celebrating the rich diversity of Jesuit culture has been launched to take place at Hereford Cathedral on 21 June 2013

The symposium, which will also celebrate the ongoing Cwm Jesuit Library project, will take place in College Hall, and will also feature an exhibition which will be open throughout the day

For more information, please visit the conference web page at worldisourhouse.blogspot.com - news and updates about the conference will be posted here as soon as they are released, so please enter your email address in the 'follow' box for automatic updates

Booking details will be released on the conference web page in the next few weeks, more news to follow soon!

Adventures and explorations

Hello everyone - apologies for the long silence, it has been a busy few weeks, for a change... Just to prove that it is not all nose-to-the-grindstone stuff, here are some exciting things I have done recently that, luckily for me, count as work:

1. A trip to the beautiful St Davids cathedral, in the world's smallest city, St Davids, in West Wales. This was to check if any Jesuit books had made their way westwards to this cathedral library, via the Vaughan family of Gelli Aur who are closely related to the Vaughan family of Courtfield. Although I didn't discover anything new (connected to the Cwm library), it was a gorgeous day in beautiful surroundings, and the combination of old books and sea views (in separate places, don't worry!) was pure heaven for me! The cathedral itself is lovely, particularly with the newly restored shrine of St David, and well worth a visit if you are ever in West Wales!

2. Provenance masterclass with David Pearson, in Cambridge University Library. This was an AMAZING opportunity to speak to a world-renowned expert on provenance history and queries, and to learn lots of useful things, such as dating anonymous bookplates and identifying different types of marginalia. David Pearson is the author of the brilliant 'Books as History' (pictured), a book designed as an introduction to the field of book history, and to the many many avenues of exploration there are to consider when analysing a book, or a library, or a collection of printed works. He was very willing to answer questions (and to sign my copy of 'Books as History'!), and didn't run screaming from the room when faced with a barrage of my questions about the Cwm collection and Jesuit provenance! I also enjoyed the creative approach to bollards adopted by the library (pictured)

3. The British Library, to check out a book with beautiful binding and some 17th century manuscripts from Hereford that had ended up there over time. A lovely building with room upon room of books, manuscripts, music and random sculptures dotted about the place (including a printing press!), plus an amazing shop - need I say more? No photographs allowed sadly, but you get the general idea :-)

4. 'Unlocking the Private Library' conference in Winchester College. A separate post to come on this soon, as there is lots to be said!

5. The National Archives in Kew, London. The aim of this trip was to scour the Privy Council minutes during the Popish Plot for any references to the Cwm, Hereford and the Cwm library. A very fruitful visit (more in due course on this) plus my visit coincided with the Italy-Wales rugby match, so the combination of rugby and 17th century records was another form of heaven for me (pictured)

Lots more trips and updates to come, plus my thoughts on writing the thesis so far, which has proved an entirely different kettle of fish to researching it! Watch this space...

Catalogues, Castles and Jesuit Colleges

The last few weeks have been extremely busy in the Cwm Project. The main focus of my work at Hereford Cathedral Library has been trying to establish exactly what arrived at Hereford from the Cwm in 1678/9, when this was first treated as a distinct collection, and what (if any) records survive of catalogues, or lists, or any other notes of the books and papers within the collection. 


Currently, after many hours of sifting through boxes of notes, drafts, works in progress and lists compiled by several previous librarians at the Cathedral, still no list of what came from the Cwm to the Cathedral seems to have been made prior to Geraint Bowen's article 'The Jesuit Library in Hereford Cathedral' published in Bulletin of the Association of British Theological and Philosophical Libraries, Vol 20 (1965) and Vol 21 (1965), pp.13-34 and pp.17-27 respectively.


I have been focusing on the work of three librarians in particular, who all made an enormous difference to the way the library at Hereford was organised, looked after and enabled the survival of many of the precious items within the library that would otherwise have been lost. Francis Tebbs Havergal (1830-1890) who was appointed Deputy Librarian in 1854, F C Morgan (1878-1978) who started voluntarily working at the Cathedral Library after his retirement in 1945 and his daughter Penelope E Morgan (1916-1990) who began helping her father with his work at the Cathedral Library after her retirement in 1953: both were appointed Honorary Librarian in recognition of their work. All three worked tirelessly to catalogue and list the many books (in several locations before the lovely current building was extended and opened in 1996) and to reorganise the whole function of the library as a working research repository. Penelope Morgan in particular has been of the most relevant value to my work, especially her Retrospective Accession Register (compiled c.1985) which details sources and donors of books where known, and lists all the books in the chronological order that they were received into the library.

However, as I still have not been able to locate a list or a catalogue of the Cwm collection in any of these papers, the next stage of this part of my research is to pick a few sample books that we now know are definitely from the Cwm and follow them through the several catalogues of the library to try and piece together the story of the Cwm books during their time at Hereford Cathedral. Existing catalogues are:

1. Donors Book, compiled from 1611 
2. c.1718 catalogue
3. 1745 catalogue
4. 1749 catalogue
5. 1780 catalogue
6. 1857 catalogue
7. Card catalogue, started c.1880
8. Slip catalogues, started c.1950
9. Online catalogue

I  have also been able to go and visit several key locations to the project in the last few weeks. I was invited to join Professor Maurice Whitehead and his third year undergraduate students from Swansea University on their visit to Raglan Castle and the Cwm as part of their work for the module entitled 'From Fear to Freedom: Catholics and the State, 1559-1829' at Swansea University:

The day's adventures began in Raglan Castle, originally held by the Herbert family until the marriage of Elizabeth Herbert and Charles Somerset (1st Earl of Worcester) in 1492, when it passed into the Somerset family, where it remained until the castle's surrender on 19th August 1646, during the Civil War. The Somerset family were staunch supporters of the recusant community after the Reformation, and used their enormous wealth and power to ensure the survival of the recusant community, and indeed, the Catholic faith, in the Monnow Valley and surrounding areas.


Several members of the Somerset family were of particular importance to the recusant cause, and supported and maintained the local recusant community from their base at Raglan. Key members of the family were Sir Edward Somerset (1550-1628), fourth Earl of Worcester; his daughter Lady Frances Somerset (d.c.1632) and her husband William Morgan of Llantarnam (d.c.1633), as well as their son Sir Edward Morgan (d.1653), first Baronet Llantarnam. The vast network of recusant connections and support from both the Somerset and the Morgan family continued to foster the survival of the Catholic community in the Marches for many generations and above all secure financial assistance in the form of an annual income that allowed the College of St Francis Xavier to be officially set up by 1622.

Our field trip was rounded up by a visit to the Cwm itself, now privately owned by a very welcoming couple who were all too eager to show us around. We timed the visit very well in terms of the weather, and were lucky enough to be able to eat our lunch in their lovely garden, looking at the amazing view and admiring the Jesuits choice of location in the Monnow Valley!

The Cwm Collection continues to expand!

Initially, only 107 volumes were thought to have survived from the 1679 raid of the Cwm, and these are described and listed by Dr Geraint Bowen in his two-part article ‘The Jesuit Library in Hereford Cathedral’, (Bulletin of the Association of British Theological and Philosophical Libraries, Vol 20 pp13-34 and Vol 21 pp17-27, 1965). A later addition to the list of books, published by Dr Bowen in The National Library of Wales Journal (Vol XXIII, 1983-4), noted that a further 41 volumes had been discovered at the Cathedral that were known to have formed part of the Cwm library due to their provenance and other marks. This made a total of 148 books now known to have survived from the Cwm.

Over the intervening years, several other books had been identified as also likely to have come from the Cwm, due to the provenance of the books (where identifiable), the subject matter and other factors. At the start of this project, September 2011, the list of books known or likely to have come from the Cwm stood at nearly 200.

As the Cathedral Library and Archives are also in the middle of digitising the catalogue for the Chained Library; and several of the latterly-identified Cwm books had come from the Chained Library, it was thought that the best approach would be to go through the books that have yet to be digitised and make a note of any that could also have come from the Cwm. Tessa and myself have spent the last few weeks working through the remaining books (see image) and have so far discovered another potential 50 books that may have come to the Cathedral from the raid on the Cwm in 1679. 

The examination of the chained books caused great interest amongst volunteers and visitors alike, with lots of interest in how the books were handled, how the chains worked, what was actually inside the books and how easy they were to read. Everyone was also very pleased to see that this wonderful old library was still very much a working library with lots to offer a researcher!

The 50 or so books identified by us so far have been broken down into the following categories:

1. Books with names or inscriptions that are on existing Cwm books
2. Books printed by, for or about the Society of Jesus; or those inscribed with ‘College St Francis Xavier’ or ‘SJ’ [Societatis Jesu]
3. Books written or printed by authors or printers that are associated with existing Cwm books
4. Books which need further investigation – these are not obviously related to the Cwm but cannot be ruled out yet due to subject matter, place of publication or inscriptions of the names of known recusants

 We still have several more shelves to go through, so yet more may be found – watch this space!

Welcome to the project!

Welcome to the first post in this exciting new project blog! The project began in September 2011, when the first in-depth analysis of the Cwm Jesuit Library was started at Hereford Cathedral Library and Archives. 

The aim of the project is to analyse and contextualise the Cwm Jesuit Library collection, which was taken to Hereford Cathedral in early 1679 following its seizure at the Cwm, Llanrothal, Herefordshire, the headquarters of the territorial College of St Francis Xavier. This 'College' (an administrative term rather than an educational establishment) was an extensive missionary sub-division of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, covering the southern half of Wales, including Monmouthshire, as well as the English counties of Gloucester, Hereford and Somerset. The Cwm collection, which has never previously been analysed thoroughly, is one of only two surviving from all 14 missionary sub-divisions or provinces of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, and as such is an important seventeenth-century survival, which promises to throw important new light on early Jesuit missionary enterprise in South Wales and the Marches. 

This is a three-year joint project between Swansea University and Hereford Cathedral, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and under the supervision of Professor Maurice Whitehead at Swansea University. The project will form the basis of a PhD thesis, which is expected to be submitted in September 2014. 

The Cwm Jesuit Library arrived at Hereford in late 1678/9 under the direction of Bishop Herbert Croft, when the Jesuit College of St Francis Xavier at the Cwm in Llanrothal near Hereford was raided as a reaction to the so-called but non-existent 'Popish Plot'. Initially, only around 100 books were thought to have survived, but recent research has discovered another 100 or so books believed to have come from the Cwm that had been stored elsewhere in Hereford Cathedral Library. This extended Cwm Library Collection of approximately 190 volumes has now been fully catalogued, and is available to search online via the library website: http://www.herefordcathedral.org/library-and-archives/online-catalogue  

Bishop Herbert Croft described the books brought from the Cwm as "Divinity books and others in Folio and Quarto and many other lesser books, several horse loads ... many whereof are written by the principal learned Jesuits ... fifteen or sixteen several printed books containing the Decrees of the several Congregations of that Society [of Jesus] at Rome ... several books lately written and printed against the Protestant religion and many small Popish Catechisms printed and tyed up in a bundle; ... some Welsh Popish books lately written and some Popish manuscripts fairly and lately written ... "  

[Herbert Croft, A short narrative of the discovery of a college of Jesuits at a place called the Come in the county of Hereford... (London: Printed by TN for Charles Harper at the Flower de luce against St Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet, 1679), Hereford Cathedral Library and Archives, reference H.P.271.5]

As the project progresses, it is hoped that much more will be discovered about the provenance of these books, their printers and booksellers, and of course the role of the Jesuits and the Cwm as part of the maintenance and survival of the recusant community in south Wales and the Marches in this crucial period of history.  

All feedback, comments and questions are always welcomed, and we hope you enjoy following the development of this fascinating research project. Thanks for your time!