Saturday 1 December 2018

A Bray Library in Newport, Essex




Our village has the reasonably rare honour of having been given a Parish Library in the early 18th century. This was also known as a Bray Library, since it was a gift of the ‘Trustees for Erecting Parochial Libraries’ associated with the clergyman Thomas Bray (1656-1730).



Thomas Bray

Bray was a missionary and founder of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1698. His particular interest was in publishing Christian texts for circulation in the colonies – he spent time in Maryland, establishing parish libraries there in order to plant the Church of England in North America. On his return to this country in around 1701 he began establishing libraries of theological works in parishes here too. Perhaps 80 parish libraries were established in this way, of which Newport’s was one, having been founded in 1710.

The records of the SPCK happen to be held at the University Library, Cambridge. I invited a rare libraries expert from the University Library, Mark Purcell, to inspect what remains of Newport’s Bray library. The Library is held in the room above the porch, normally firmly locked, and accessible only via a very steep spiral staircase (albeit now nicely restored). The room itself is somewhat bare and very dusty. It consists of two book cases and a book cupboard – perhaps the original cupboard used for housing the Bray library, since the markings of where the catalogue would have been pasted can still be seen on the inside of the cupboard door. Various boxes of papers gather dust, and cobwebs and rodent droppings are much in evidence.
 

The original Bray Library cupboard
According to an excerpt from the official directory of Parochial Libraries, which Mark copied for me, Newport received 72 volumes in 1710. More volumes were added in 1834. The collection was given up in 1870 but then re-established in 1879 and further augmented in 1889 and 1896. Of the original 1710 volumes, only 49 remained by 1834 and then only 3 or 4 by 1959. Therefore, the Newport Bray Library is, unfortunately, nothing of the sort, since very few of the original books remain in the collection.

However, there are lots of books, perhaps 800 or so, many of them dating from before 1800. These must be associated with the periods of library augmentation in the 19th century. Mark wondered if the story of the Library is connected with what happened to the Newport Free Grammar School (now the Joyce Frankland Academy). The school was originally housed in the building now known as Church House, directly opposite the church, before moving to its new site in c.1878. Perhaps the building of the new school premises, and the removal of the school from the immediate vicinity of the church, was the reason why the room above the church was fitted out as a library room in around 1879. Certainly, Mark felt the fireplace now in the room dated from this time.

It seems a shame that Newport's Parochial Library is not often seen or used, but then the texts will be of little relevance to readers today (many of the earliest are in Latin or Greek). We already have a handwritten list of the books in the room, but perhaps there is work to be done to write this list up into a more detailed database, which could include a record of the various handwritten inscriptions inside (sometimes giving evidence of the provenance of individual volumes). The first task, though, would be simply to dust the room, though this is likely to be a filthy job that would then need to be repeated on a fairly regular basis.








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