Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T23:54:18.807Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Catholicism and the Church of England in a Northern Library: Henry Halsted and the Burnley Grammar School Library

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2016

Stuart Mews  and
Michael Mullett
Stuart Mews
Affiliation:
Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education University of Lancaster
Michael Mullett
Affiliation:
Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education University of Lancaster
Get access

Extract

THE contents of what was described in 1885 as ‘the most extensive and the most interesting of the old Grammar School Libraries of Lancashire’, the Burnley Grammar School Library, shed interesting light on the state of religious controversy in the north between the late sixteenth and the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The library, which, through the generosity of Burnley Grammar School and with the kind co-operation of the Lancashire County Library, is now on permanent loan at Lancaster University, forms, as presently constituted, a collection of 875 volumes, published mainly in the seventeenth century. It owes its foundation to, and, as we shall see, reflects the religious interests, aims, and viewpoint of, the Revd Henry Halsted (1641-1728), rector of Stansfield, in Suffolk, who left the whole of his personal library to the Burnley Grammar School in 1728. Shortly after Halsted’s death, the collection was augmented by a small addition of books presented by another clergyman, the Revd Edmund Towneley of Rowley, rector of Slaidburn, Lancashire. It is, therefore, essentially a clerical and religious library and provides an interesting example of what sort of material typical, affluent English incumbents of the Augustan and early Hanoverian period considered worthy of places on their study shelves. For purposes of comparison within the region, a collection by two laymen made in another northern town and, like the Halsted-Towneley collection, charitably gifted, the Petyt Library, built up to over two thousand volumes by two brothers in the first decade of the eighteenth century, and now housed within Skipton Public Library, with its heavy emphasis on divinity, can be profitably examined. In the essay that follows we shall consider the Burnley Collection as essentially that of its principal donor, Henry Halsted, and as enshrining his aims.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History Subsidia , Volume 12: Life and Thought in the Northern Church , 1999 , pp. 533 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 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

1 Christie, R. G., ‘The old church and school libraries of Lancashire’, Chetham Society, ns 7 (1885), p. 121Google Scholar.

2 A Catalogue of the Petyt Library at Skipton, Yorkshire (Gargrave, 1964).

3 Foster, Joseph, Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1500-1714, 4 vols, repr. (Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1968), 1, p. 637Google Scholar; Bennett, W., A History of the Grammar School, Burnley (Burnley, 1940), introduction and pp. 13, 15–16Google Scholar; Bennett, W., A History of Burnley and the Grammar School during the Sixteenth Century (Burnley, 1930), pp. 17–18, 29Google Scholar.

4 Ibid.

5 Warren, Leo, ‘The Catholic community in the North West’, in Mullen, Michael and Warren, Leo, Martyrs of the Diocese of Lancaster Beatified on the Feast of Christ the King (Preston, 1987) P.14Google Scholar; Hilton, J.A., Catholic Lancashire from Reformation to Renewal,1559-1991 (Chichester, 1991), p. 12Google Scholar.

6 Bennett, , History of the Grammar School, pp. 13, 15–16Google Scholar; Warren, ‘The Catholic community’, pp. 14, 31.

7 Mullett and Warren, Martyrs of the Diocese of Lancaster, p. 45; Cross, Claire, Church and People, 1450-1660 (London, 1976), p. 204Google Scholar; Bennett, , History of the Grammar School, p. 26Google Scholar.

8 HMC, 14th report, App., part 4: The Manuscripts of Lord Kenyon (London, 1894), pp. 109-10; Mullen, Michael, ‘“A Receptacle for Papists and an Assilum”: Catholicism and disorder in late seventeenth-century Wigan’, CathHR, 73 (1987), pp. 391–407Google Scholar; Bennett, , History of the Grammar School, p. 21Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., pp. 31, 55.

10 See the introduction to Miller, John, Popery and Politics in England (London, 1973)Google Scholar, and Haydon, Colin, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-century England, c. 1714-80. A Political and Social Study (Manchester and New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

11 Lancaster University Library, Burnley Grammar School Library [hereafter BGSL]: no. 670: London (Eliot’s Court Press): George Bishop, 1598: STC, no. 20628; British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books (1963), 198, p. 178.

12 For Rainolds and Hart, see DNB, 16, pp. 62-3, 9, pp. 61-2.

13 BGSL, nos 851, 852: 2 vols in 1, London: Thomas Adams, 1611: STC, no. 50.

14 DNB, 1, pp. 24-5; Hill, Christopher, ‘William Perkins and the poor’, in idem, , Puritanism and Revolution. Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 213Google Scholar; Cross, , Church and People, p. 159Google Scholar; Collinson, Patrick, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in English Society 1559-1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 81–3Google Scholar; Tyacke, Nicholas, Anti-Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminians, c. 1590-1640 (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar, ch. 8.

15 DNB, 1, pp. 24-5; Cross, , Church and People, p. 173Google Scholar.

16 STC, nos 3096, 3098, 3094.

17 DNB, 2, pp. 558-9.

18 BGSL, no. 322: 2nd edn, London: Richard Badger, 1639: STC, no. 15298; Carlton, Charles, Archbishop William Laud (London and New York, 1987), pp. 37–40Google Scholar.

19 DNB, 7, pp. 63-4.

20 DNB, 4, pp. 1190, 1194, 1195; BGSL, no. 596: 2nd edn, London: Tyler, E. for Pawlett, Robert, 1672: Wing, Donald, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America… 1641-1700, 3 vols (New York, 1972)Google Scholar [hereafter Wing, STC], no. C6361.

21 BGSL, no. 714: London: for Joshua Phillips and Joseph Watts, 1688 edn: Wing, STC, no. J436; DNB, 10, pp. 658-60.

22 BGSL, no. 618: 4th edn, London: Benjamin Tooke, 1686: Wing, STC, no. U150; DNB, 20, pp. 63-72.

23 BGSL, no. 617: London: Samuel Roycroft for Robert Clavell, 1695: Wing, STC, no. C5447; Chambers Biographical Dictionary, ed. Thome, J. O., rev. edn (London and Edinburgh, 1969), p. 92Google Scholar.

24 BGSL, no. 846: London, for Strahan, George, 1713: British Museum Catalogue, 135, p. 689Google Scholar; DNB, 11, pp. 956-62.

25 BGSL, no. 577: London; S. Roycroft for R. Clavell, 1681: Wing, STC, no. B826.

26 BGSL, no. 985: 2nd edn, London: W.B. for Sare, Richard, 1707: British Museum Catalogue, 29, p. 558Google Scholar; DNB, 3, pp. 236-8.

27 BGSL, no. 843: 1st edn, London: Moses Pitt, 1676: Wing, STC, no. B5856.

28 BGSL, no. 244: London, A. Islip, F. Kyngston, and R. Young, 1632: STC, no. 11228.

29 BGSL, no. 1020: last edn, London: E. Cotes for S. Thompson, 1667: Wing, STC, no. P2828; DNB, 16, pp. 99-110.