The Wren Library

 

Lincoln Cathedral has had to spend a huge sum of money securing the roof and floor timbers of the Wren Library.   

Putting a stock of valuable books into storage was one of the expensive projects with which great care needed to be taken.  It made sense doing the maximum amount of restoration and putting in things like new heating, lighting and humidifier control work while the books were away.

Some staff and volunteers were allowed one of several quick visit opportunities last week.  There will now be a deep conservation clean and months of careful environmental monitoring as the new systems operate before the books are brought back.

The doorway used to lead into a passageway into the old Deanery, and now the blocked off route provides a cupboard in which the switches and systems are placed.   

The humidifiers beneath the side tables will have discrete quality covers; the skirting boards have been widened to take service cables.

The Oxford Mallams

 

Algorithms knew it was worth drawing my attention to an item in the Law Society Gazette dated 12 January.  I realise it is just applied maths, but I still find this weird. 

RWK Goodman…, Thames valley legal giant, is to acquire HMG Law, which is reputed to be Oxfordshire’s oldest legal firm…  Staff… will be integrated… at Minns Business Park…  Herbert, Mallam, Gowers can trace its history back to 1838.  Founding father Thomas Mallam enrolled as a solicitor and set up… in Oxford’s Turl Street.

My father’s parents were cousins.  Their mothers were sisters, both daughters of Thomas Mallam. 

I have a pair of pictures in my hallway which are the wedding group in 1864 and the Diamond Wedding Group in 1924 of Thomas Mallam’s oldest child Jessie with the Revd Henry Mullins.  Thomas Mallam and his wife Martha Joy are at the back in the first photo.  My father, aged two, wriggling on his mother’s knee, is at the front in the second one.

My first thought was that the Gazette had, quite understandably, missed the way Thomas Mallam was to move his firm to 126 High Street (a rare surviving Tudor building) when his father, who died in 1850, ceased trading there. 

So, businesses with the Mallam name have been trading from the same premises for at least two hundred years.  Although I find HGM Law’s website gives the firm’s address as 1 St Aldates, which suggests it must have moved since I was last passing by, and the striking link had been broken anyway.

Thomas Mallam’s grandfather, Richard Mallam, became a freeman of Oxford in 1788.  His son, an older Thomas Mallam, is then listed as an auctioneer in the 1841 census.  Mallam Auctioneers, operating today in St Michael Street, has 1788 as its logo.  So the Mallam trading name in the city goes back fifty years before the younger Thomas Mallam’s career took a different legal path. 

And it will continue with Mallam Auctioners, although no member of the Mallam family will have worked in any of those firms for the last hundred years.  The last to be involved were the younger Thomas Mallam’s sons, a further Thomas and an Edward, who were still working in their father’s legal practice into the early 1920s.

So, to be clear, there were actually three Thomas Mallams, father, son and grandson.  They have appeared in this Blog before, as a search for the Mallam name will reveal.

An particularly niche piece of information is that each died in a house in Oxford called The Shrubbery.  The first Thomas Mallam (son of the Richard made a freeman in 1788, and himself twice Mayor of Oxford) built a villa in the countryside north of St Giles; the house is now the lodgings of the Principal of St Hugh’s.  He died there, as did his son (the one who became a solicitor in 1838).  The third Thomas Mallam (brother of my father’s grandmothers, the one who continued to work at 126 High Street until the 1920s) gave the same name to his home in Littlemore, which is where he died; Littlemore’s Catholic Presbytery is now on that site.  

Meanwhile, the picture was taken this week in St Marylebone Parish Church.

If you are God's son

 

The division of the New Testament into chapters and verses helps identify a quotation or find a text.  But it is has only done so for less than half the New Testament’s life so far.  The division into chapters is attributed to Stephen Langton, the Lincolnshire born Archbishop of Canterbury who pressed King John to grant the Magna Carta in 1215.  The division into verses waited until the introduction of printing and was the work of a bookseller in Paris. 

Each modern version often also includes section headings.  However helpful these prompts by individual publishers might be, they have also never been part of the text.  And each modern ‘lectionary’ also portions up the specific passages for reading at particular services, which means navigating around to find it isn’t always necessary anyway. 

So this Sunday’s reading from the Gospels can be listed as ‘Matthew 3.13-17’, easy to locate by that numbering, even easier to locate if the passage is placed under a heading ‘Baptism of Jesus’ or set out on its own as ‘the Gospel for the feast of the Baptism of Jesus’. 

After it, most Bibles have a short gap, a new chapter number, and often a fresh subheading – making a very firm demarcation from the next story.  It is what will be ‘the Gospel for the first Sunday in Lent’ – which is in six weeks time.  Matthew 3.13-17 is placed at some distance on the page and in time from Matthew 4.1-11.

But, just for a moment, consider the final forty-six words of the first of these passages and the first forty-six words of the second as one continuous text, which is how it was written.

… Jesus immediately

coming up from the water

and behold the heavens were opened

and he saw the spirit of God

coming down on him like a dove

and behold a voice out of the heavens

saying this is my son

the beloved in whom I delight.

Then Jesus was led by the spirit

into the wilderness

to be tempted by the devil,

and having fasted forty days and nights

afterwards he hungered,

and the tempter came near

saying to him if you are God’s son

say that these stones will become bread…

We see at once it is a single story, one poem. 

We see that Jesus’ encounter with the spirit of God is both about God’s delight in him and his being led to the devil almost as one connected act. 

We see the voice from heaven’s ‘this is my son’ quickly paralleled by the tempter’s close by ‘if you are God’s son’.

It is about Jesus and the spirit of God.  The journey begun at Jesus’ baptism is one which lead him to the cross.

But it feels as if it also hints that God’s delight in us is can be intimately, almost necessarily, linked not with a comfort blanket but with exposure to life, to danger? 

It feels as if it hints that the danger might often begin with an ‘if this is true?’?

The human Jesus, the 'problem of suffering', and questions about the nature of Christ all woven inextricably into the text from the very beginning.  And our journey alongside.

The picture is from Bishop Wordswoth’s grave at Riseholme.

Dame Margaret Thorold's Charity

Margaret Waterer’s first husband was the Hon Francis Coventry, a son of the first Lord Coventry and a brother-in-law of the first Earl of Shaftesbury, both of whom were active in Civil War, Commonwealth and Restoration government.  It is with him that she was eventually buried in Mortlake in 1732, many years after his death.  There is a board in the church there recording her endowment of a charity for the support of the poor in Barnes.  The board says it was restored in 1811 by the then Earl of Coventry, a successor of her father-in-law.

In 1701, she married again, this time Sir John Thorold, the 4^th Baronet Thorold of Marston.  The wedding was in Westminster Abbey; he was an MP at the time.  Following his death fifteen years later, she founded a school in Marston in his memory.  It still exists and it is still supported by an educational charity she founded.  Sir John’s hatchment hangs in Marston church, where he (but not she) is buried.  A further still extant charity was established by her will to support local apprentices. 

She and Sir John had no children, and the baronetcy was inherited by a cousin of his, and then by that cousin’s son, each of them dying soon after succeeding.  So in 1731 the 7^th Baronet Thorold of Marston had for the last ten years been a further cousin of Dame Margaret’s husband, also a Sir John Thorold.  His heir was another John Thorold.  It is these last two John Thorolds who are named on a board in the north east transept of Lincoln Cathedral.  It records their being entrusted with the establishment of yet another of her charities.

In the Year 1731, DAME MARGARET THOROLD WIDOW, and relict of Sir JOHN THOROLD late of MARISTO N in this County BARRT, Transferred to Sir JOHN THOROLD of this County BARRT and JOHN THOROLD Esqr his Eldest Son; One Thousand Five Hundred POUNDS, South Sea Annuities in trust, to lay out the Money arisieing by the Sale thereof in the Purchase of Lands of Inheritance in this County, and the Rents and Profits of which, and the Produce of the Annuities till Sold, to be Equally Divided Between Six Poor Old Men of the CITY and Minster of LINCOLN that are past their Labour and do not Receive Alms of the parishes as more fully appears by a Deed bearing Date the 13^th Day of January.  Registered in LINCOLN Minster. the lands are att Sturton in the Parish of Stow, in this County.

The annuities were not investments in the South Sea Bubble which had burst eleven years earlier, but in the South Sea Company which had survived that crash.  The deed specified three old men from below the hill and three from uphill, as nominated by Sir John.  An indenture three years later agreed that the income would come from a £60 p.a. rent charge on land owned by Sir John at ‘Sturton in the Street, in the parish of Stow’.  This would have been the equivalent of 4% interest on the original £1500 investment.  Payment was made half yearly, on Lady Day and at Michaelmas, the beginning and the half way point of the financial year.  

Lincolnshire Archive holds a report made in 1837 which records those details of the 1731 deed and the 1734 indenture, a century on [WG/7/2/4/1].  It names Thomas Forby as the the person then paying the rent charge, and a farmer aged around 75 named Thomas Fourby is recorded at Sturton in the 1841 census.  It observes that only freemen had been beneficiaries of the charity, although neither the deed nor indenture required this, and it recommends that this restriction on beneficiaries be ended.

The bulk of the small set of relevant documents in the Archive are dated 1889, by which time inflation would have almost halved the value of the original rent charge.  It was being paid by the executors of an E. Hyde (which is not a name which shows up in Sturton in censuses in either 1871 or 1881).  It names those who were receiving £10 each year, perhaps a quarter of what an agricultural labourer would have been paid [WG/8/2/4/5].

John Thurger of 8 Rasen Lane

Thomas Johnson of 12 Princess Street

James Ward of 13 Flaxen Gate

John Cousins of 12 Thorngate

- Goffin of 22 Church Lane

Joseph Linn of 4 St Paul’s Lane

Three are from down the hill and three from uphill.  Census returns do not easily identify them all, but Johnson was a labourer aged 76 and Cousins a cabinet maker aged 79, while Thurger was a fitter aged only 53 and with a young family.

A new scheme for the charity was being made at this time, handing responsibility to the shared trustees of the Lincoln Municipal Charities, alongside the then Sir John Thorold (the family’s lack of originality in forenames persisted) and his successors [WG/8/2/4/19].  The Archive also hold a public notice that year jointly advertising vacancies for beneficiaries in six other local charities, naming the deceased recipient in each case, into whose place a potential fresh beneficiary might apply or be recommended [WG/8/4/2/29].

At which point the trail runs cold for me, at least for the moment.  Inflation will have made the £60 a year of 1734 or 1889 worth only a few pence today.  There is an extant Lincoln Municipal Relief in Need Charity which makes grants worth about £45 000 a year for white goods.  Is this the successor of the Lincoln Municipal Charities which took over running Dame Margaret’s Charity?  Might a few pence of one of those grants each year arise from it?  Or, perhaps the pittance of the rent charge was either bought out or allowed to lapse during the twentieth century, and her endowment has run its course?

The Usher Gallery has a Joshua Reynolds portrait of Isabella Thorold, a granddaughter of the Sir John Trollope to whom Dame Margaret entrusted her South Sea annuities.  One of her grandchildren was the Bishop Edward Trollope in whose honour the pulpit in the Cathedral’s St Hugh’s Choir was dedicated.  So it is possible to stand in the transept and look one way at the charity board bearing her grandfather’s name and look the other way at the pulpit bearing her grandson’s.

Her father, the John Thorold Esq of the charity board (and later, in his turn, a Sir John Thorold), is also worth serious attention.  He was an exact contemporary of John Wesley (they were born ten weeks and ten miles apart), preceded him in the same Fellowship at Lincoln College, Oxford, and was a leading collaborator in the early stages of the Methodist movement, including being part of the religious societies meeting in London in one of which Wesley had his decisive heart warming experience in 1738.  But his is a story for another day.

An astonishing Epiphany

 

Matthew tells us that magoi came seeking the one born King of the Jews.  King of the Jews is the title about which he will say Pilate asked and then wrote at the time of the crucifixion.

The word magoi occurs elsewhere both in the New Testament and in contemporary non-biblical writing, something which ought to get better attention.  Such magoi seem most likely to have been Zoroastrians whose worship included focussing on fire and astrology, easily mistaken for magicians and sorcerers.

In Acts 13 Sergio Paulo, Roman proconsul on Cyprus, does not have a chaplain or a court fool at hand in his household, but a magos (singular of magoi).  When Barnabas and Saul spoke the word of God to the proconsul, it was this magos who intervened seeking to put the proconsul off.  That particular magos is rendered blind as a result, perhaps both literally and deeply symbolically. 

In Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (30.16) the Armenian visitors doing obeisance to Nero in 66 AD include magoi.  It is a major event about which others also write.  Pliny notes that the magoi regarded having freckles as a successful way of avoiding the notice of the Gods and that they would not travel by sea for fear of polluting it.

So I imagine a Christian group in Rome in serious danger, keeping their heads down in the face of Nero’s persecution.  They receive a new longer story of Jesus’ life and pass it secretly from hand to hand.  What we will call Chapter 1 sets the scene of the human and divine origins of Jesus’ birth.  They read on eagerly to the next story.

They could not be more astonished to find that it was about star-led magoi coming to worship Jesus.  Those who had opposed Barnabas and Saul’s preaching.  Those who had lauded Nero as God-like. 

There is a later habit of representing three magoi as one coming from Africa, one from Asia and one from Europe – the wisdom of the whole world turning towards this event.  Perhaps Matthew’s purpose, and the first reader’s astonishment, would best be represented by different trio, something like a militant atheist, a scientologist and a member of the Taliban.

The picture is Whitley Bay at the New Year.  The picture in the previous post are two angels high in a window in Grimsby Minster carrying symbols of Jesus’ execution – a seamless garment with the dice for which it was gambled and the hammer and pliers for the nailing and un-nailing of Jesus on the cross.