The Hurd Library

A beautiful Georgian Library at Hartlebury Castle, Worcestershire. The Library was founded by Richard Hurd, Bishop of Worcester 1781-1808. Blog by Hurd Librarian, Christine Penney. Follow @HurdLibrary Follow @HartleburyCPT

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Yes - we CAN do computers!

When we show books in the Hurd Library we usually tell visitors we can cover almost every subject - apart from football, motor cars and computers. That was until Penny Greenwood, working on her conservation survey one day, got to this book:

There were 6 volumes of it! With memories of dull maths lessons at school Penny resigned herself to a few tedious hours looking for damaged pages, always assuming Bishop Hurd had bothered to read it. Then, in volume 4, she found these 2 plates:

They illustrate the adding machine designed in 1642 by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). France’s most celebrated mathematician, he began his career as a child prodigy. His father  was a supervisor of taxes in Rouen and Blaise worked with him in his office. Fed up with the laborious calculations involved he invented a machine to help, which became known as the Pascaline. It could do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. He built 20 machines and 9 of them survive, including 4 in Paris and 2 in Clermont Ferrand, his birthplace. There had actually been a predecessor, designed in 1623 by Wilhelm Schikard (1592-1635). He designed a calculating clock, which could add and subtract 6 digit numbers, but it was destroyed before completion and the designs were lost until the 19th century. So Pascal has the glory of making the first step towards computers and when we show the book to visitors they often exclaim “Bletchley Park!”

For this lovely discovery we are indebted to the book’s compiler, Francis Maseres (1731-1824). He was of Huguenot descent, studied maths at Clare College Cambridge and also studied law. He was appointed Attorney General in Quebec in 1766, but managed to upset both the merchants and the militia so he was given permanent leave of absence and went home to enjoy a life of bachelor leisure in the Temple. He was found a job as Cursitor Baron of the Exchequer at £300-£400 a year but this was a virtual sinecure. He was often referred to as Baron Maseres however. An evident eccentric, he spoke the French of  Louis XIV’s reign and wore clothes from the time of George II. He evidently knew Bishop Hurd and favoured him with a copy of his collection of essays on logarithms; Hurd duly inscribed it:

An additional benefit of this inscription is that we now know  the library stamp was in use by 1793.

The book has other illustrations too - for example some nice pictures of boats:

But they will have to wait until we find out what they have to do with logarithms.

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Dreaming of a white Christmas?

It doesn’t look like snow this year -but nearly 102 years ago they had some at Hartlebury. What is now our reception area was a convalescent hospital for soldiers wounded in the First World War. One of the VAD sisters painted this watercolour in January 1917.

Less than a century later, in  December 2010, Hartlebury was smothered in snow (we had to cancel a concert) and on  the morning of  Christmas Day George Ward took this photograph of the castle:

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Cheer boys it’s Hartlebury!

Just in time for the centenary of the Armistice Doug Smith’s book on the VAD convalescent hospital at Hartlebury Castle was published.

Doug began work on this book in 2015. Using the three albums we have in the Hurd Library and four at the Hive in Worcester he has researched every soldier who was a patient in the little building which is now the Castle reception, and some of the nurses too. Here is Bishop Yeatman-Biggs posing with  them:

And a group of the nurses:

So many victims of the carnage 100 years ago have no memorial; thanks to Doug all those who wrote such grateful and touching messages in our albums do.

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Any one for Sueca?

When Penny Greenwood was looking at this book to see if it needed repairs she was struck by one of the illustrations.

The caption described it as a Chilean Indian playing sueca - which looked so remarkably like golf that she googled it and found it was indeed an early form of the game, played in Chile. The name may have been taken from a town in Valencia, called Sueca -which is apparently a perfect place for golf and has a stunning coastline.

The author of the book, Amedee Francois Frezier, (1682-1773), a Lieutenant in the French Intelligence Corps, was sent to study the military fortifications of Chile and Peru, but he did a lot more, pretending to be a tourist and studying the geography, flora and fauna and customs. His surname was derived from “fraise” - the French for strawberry - and he brought some Chilean strawberries back with him. The book goes down very well with our visitors, showing the multitude of subjects that interested Bishop Hurd - though there is no evidence he was a sportsman.

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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The spring offensive

Philip Larkin was not a fan of gardening. The approach of spring, so graphically described in one of his letters, filled him with dismay. It has come late this year but has been one of the best ever. Thanks to our team of volunteer gardeners it has been seen at Hartlebury in all its glory, especially above the lake, where the foxgloves are no longer choked by undergrowth.

 Not far away in Birrmingham, in 1775, William Withering identified the ingredient digitalis in this gorgeous flower, and Curtis included it among the wild flowers of London a few years later.

We have irises too:

And here they are in Curtis:

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian 

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The Hurd Library - back in business!

The last  tour of the Hurd Library was on 5th December 2016. Since then the work to get Hartlebury Castle ready for visitors has kept it closed, with the books under sheets of polythene. So it’s fitting that the first tour we  organised, on 20th March, was for Steve Cooper and his team from Croft Building and Conservation Ltd., who have worked on the site for so many months. They left their boots and hard hats outside on the landing:

And their first sight as we opened the door produced the exclamations we always like to hear: “Wow!” 

 Then they clustered round the table in the bow window, where Penny showed them some of the books:

They’ve done a great job and have been a pleasure to work with.  Bishop Hurd was equally pleased with James Smith, who built the library for him in 1782, but his measurements were not always quite as accurate  - as the carpet fitter discovered when laying the carpet between the two lots of pillars; however his skill means you would never guess that the spaces aren’t identical..

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Restored to glory!

At long last the work on the Hurd Library is complete. We put the polythene shrouds over the books and paintings on 4 July 2017 and we took them off on 9 March this year.

And we have a new carpet - the first for over half a century.

The lighting is better and so is the heating. We shall soon be able to welcome visitors again. Little did I think, when starting work here ten years ago, with the Friends of Hartlebury Castle and the Hurd Library, before we founded the Hartlebury Castle Trust, that we’d ever get to this happy state  Forty  years ago, when I first saw the library, it seemed even less likely. Never give up hope!

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Hard hats at Hartlebury

The Hurd Library is still under wraps but work is now in progress on the lift which will make life easier for our visitors.

This was once a bathroom!

Here are Penny and me in our costumes:

Chris Penney, Hurd Librarian

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The Hartlebury Michelangelo

Work has begun on the refurbishment at Hartlebury Castle, including the decoration of the great hall and painting over the germolene-pink on its ceiling. Our artist used a cherry-picker, a more comfortable position than lying flat high above the Sistine Chapel. Scaffolding covers  most of the east front -

and as for the Hurd Library, it looks much as it must have done when James Smith was building it in 1782.

The floorboards are of white poplar, which were known in the eighteenth century to be fire-resistant. The electric cables from the long gallery underneath are being drawn up  though the middle of the floor, so we have to watch our step. So far we have not found anything interesting down there, apart from 235 year-old dust. And we have no running water, so we feel we are sharing the conditions of Mr Smith and his team, who were doubtless as charming as their counterparts here today.

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Emmanuel College in springtime

I’ve been in Cambridge for over a month and the gardens of Bishop Hurd’s college were looking wonderful.

Exactly 270 years ago Hurd was an undergraduate here, aged 17. He had already begun  to collect books, inscribing his name nearly on the flyleaves:

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Ten years later he was the Fellow Librarian, working in the building to the left of Wren's chapel.

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Monkey Business

When you think of Egypt pyramids and sphinxes usually spring to mind - like the view George Sandys saw in 1610.

But Penny found a very different book in the Hurd Library a few weeks ago:

As usual she had a good look and found plenty of plates illustrating interesting plants, but she also found these:

We hope Bishop Hurd enjoyed them as much as we did. They certainly look pretty happy, though the first one seems to be chained to his seat.

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Back where he belongs

Lord Mansfield’s bust was one of our subjects a few years ago, after we had discovered its marble plinth lying in a glory-hole outside the Hurd Library. Now it is back on it, in the library, after many years sitting on an inappropriate pedestal in the great hall.

The last recorded sight of this monument in the Hurd Library was in 1860, in Francis Kilvert’s biography of Bishop Hurd.

Thanks to our new director, Mark Davies, who carried the marble slabs for us, they are reunited at last. Lord Mansfield sits once again under the portrait of his old friend, Bishop Hurd, and we can work under the benign expressions of them both.

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Spotting a fake

Computers are pretty clever these days at identifying instances of literary plagiarism or forgery. As reported in The Times recently, scientists writing in the journal Advances in Complex Systems have analysed the epics of Ossian, claimed by James Macpherson, who published them in 1760 under the title Fingal, to be the genuine works of a blind Scottish bard who lived in the third century AD. They were extremely popular and Napoleon carried them around with him in his baggage.  The researchers, though not accusing Macpherson of making the poems up, report that the work does appear to be an ingenious fake, modelled on Irish poems written some 800 years after Ossian is supposed to have died.

Several 18th century  scholars and poets, including Thomas Gray,  believed the poems to be genuine but one scholar, with no mechanical aid but his own acute brain, considered them to be forgeries from the outset. Bishop Hurd had a copy of the 1762 edition in his own library.

He had seen a copy in 1761 and wrote to William Warburton on Christmas Day that year, from his rectory at Thurcaston: “I have by accident got a sight of this mighty Fingal.... To say nothing of the want of external evidence, or, which looks still worse, his shuffling over in such a manner the little evidence he pretends to give us, every page appears to me to afford internal evidence of forgery.” He goes on at some length, with examples to prove his point. The Christmas post was obviously very reliable that year as Warburton was able to reply the day after Boxing Day. He, poor man, had to admit he had been completely taken in: “I am fully convinced of my false opinion... concerning Fingal. I did not consider the matter as I ought. Your reasons for the forgery are unanswerable. ... You have waked me from a very pleasing dream.”

Bishop Hurd couldn’t always recognise a masterpiece - Boswell and Gibbon were not among his favourites - but he could certainly spot a fake.

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Surviving the Somme

In July we posted a blog about Corporal T Smyth, who convalesced at Hartlebury after being wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. He made a lively entry in the first of the albums compiled by the VAD nurses who ran the hospital.

We were afraid he had been sent back to the front , despite being wounded three times, but to our delight one of our followers looked him up and found he survived. He had arrived in France on 29 November 1914 but after his last wound he was promoted to Sergeant and transferred to a home battalion, suitable for an injured soldier, where his job was to train other soldiers. So he was safe in Blighty. There is a photograph of him in one of the albums.

He is number 6, on the right of the group who were the winners of the boat race at the gymkhana held at nearby Wilden on 19 August 1916.

His name appears in the programme:

So  perhaps he was not too badly wounded. He looks pretty fit in the photograph:

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Archival secrets

We never know what we might find in the Hurd Library. Last week I was sorting a pile of bills sent to Bishop Hurd’s nephew, young Richard, in 1827, the year he died. They had been filed in the old fashioned way, impaled on a spike after being paid, and later fastened with string. Two bills from Thomas Price for meat, bread and washing, had been sent on one sheet, now torn in half for accurate filing:

The reverse showed the sheet had been addressed to Richard Hurd, so I put the two pieces together:

Then I held them up to the light to see if there was a watermark. There was - and I was probably the first to look at it for 189 years:

I’ve no idea if one of my ancestors was a paper maker - but who knows!

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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From the Somme to Hartlebury

The centenary of the Battle of the Somme was on the 1st of July. We had a tour at Hartlebury that day and Penny found that one of the soldiers wounded on the very first day was nursed at the VAD hospital at the castle.

Here is his contribution to the albums compiled by the VAD nurses - Corporal T Smyth of the 1st Irish Rifles; “Irish and proud of it”, he wrote.  He had already been wounded twice in 1915 and was no doubt patched up and sent back to the trenches. We have not found a record of his death so I hope he survived and found someone to enjoy his little poem. Read it down in 8 columns, not across, or you will be as baffled as Penny was to start with!

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian

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Wild about Worcester Cathedral

Charles Wild (1781-1835) was a watercolour artist and engraver specialising in architecture. He published works on six English cathedrals - Canterbury,York, Chester, Lichfield, Lincoln and finally Worcester. We have a fine copy of this in the Hurd Library.

It was published in 1823, after Bishop Hurd’s death, but was probably purchased by Richard Hurd jr who has bound in some fine watercolours of the cathedral by James Ross. Usually I study these but last week I had a closer look at Wild’s engravings. These are large and detailed - here is the north side of the cathedral taken from College Yard.

As in so many topographical prints you barely notice the tiny figures the artist has included, but a close-up is revealing.

What I thought was a row of posts  near the north porch is actually a little procession of children, two by two. So I had a look at some of the others too.

A procession at the beginning of a service.

Is this a little boy with his grandfather? What is Grandpa looking at?

A couple being taken round.

And another small boy with his parents in the choir. All recorded in a moment of their lives but scarcely visible to the naked eye.

Christine Penney, Hurd Librarian