15 - Clerical and parish libraries

Summary

To begin with, a tale of two clergy: John Favour, seventeenth-century vicar of Halifax, and John Wilkinson, one of his fifteenth-century predecessors. Writing in 1619, Favour poured scorn on the pre-Reformation clergy for relying so heavily on ‘their golden Legends, Saints lives, Festivals, Martyrologies, Sermones discipuli, and such like wholesome books’, when ‘the Scriptures lay perhaps motheaten in a few libraries, and were scarse to be found in one Priests studie of an hundred’. To illustrate his point, he cited

the will of a predecessor of mine, in the Vicaridge of Hallifax, dated anno Dom. 1477; who giveth no booke in his will, but one …Item lego Ioanni Wilkinson filio Roberti Wilkinson, unum librum nominatum Legenda Sanctorum, si sit Presbyter: I bequeath to John Wilkinson my brother Robert his sonne, one booke called the Legend of Saints, if he be a Priest. By which we may see, what store of bookes such a man in those dayes had; perhaps in all likelihood, he had not a better.

At first glance, this appears to present us with the starkest possible contrast between pre- and post-Reformation libraries. Favour was a man of wide learning whose personal library was evidently a large one. In his will, he bequeathed ‘my best English Bible’ to his son William, his duplicates (‘one of every sort of my bookes which I have dubble’) to his son-in-law Henry Power, and the remainder of his library to his son John. When he reflected on the solitary volume owned by his medieval predecessor, then glanced round at his own well-stocked bookshelves, it must have seemed to him as though darkness had been succeeded by light. The benighted ignorance of the popish clergy had given way to a new age of learning in which, thanks to the protestant Reformation, the Bible and other religious books were more widely available than ever before.